Well I started out with a CENTURY-21 radio . and I still have it here right in front of me ..hihi.

Its more or less similar electronics as the SSR-1 and the cct that came with it was actually of the SSR-1 ...go figure.

It stopped working for a while until last year, I decided to find out why...it turned out to be nothing more than a dry solder joint in the Power supply area.....and works now like it did back then....

Strange as it may sound, mine was a Japanese-built Conion Technisonic TC-555 which I bought in 1986... it was actually a huge AM/FM boom box with 2 SW bands which covered 1.8 to about 22 mhz. I could tune in WWV pretty easily, but even I didn't have a steady enough hand to tune that old analog dial to any of the international broadcasters.

I especially remember hearing the old "chugga-chugga-beep-beep" of the SSTV rigs hams had back then on 80 and 40m.

Drake 2B.It had such a great sound. Also used a Drake TR4 for quite a few years. My elmer had a basement full of old gear that he bought, sold, bartered and gave away. Loads of Drake and Hallicrafters.

First 'real' SW radio I had was an old RCA Radio Direction Finder with a blown power supply. All tubes, no real band=pread function.

My dad and I built a new AC supply on the old chassis, got it working, and used it for BCB listening for years. It was fairly deaf, had a lousy BFO that I finally modified to have an adjustable frequency..

Gave it away when I left home. Now have an old HQ-180 to keep the shack warm...

My father gave me a Halicrafters S-120 when I was six (1962) I used to listen to the RTTY thinking I was hearing Russian spies passing encoded messages. Ofcourse I would tune in any shortwave conversation I ran across and especially loved the static crashes when a summer storm was on the horizon. good times for a little boy....

Allied Radio 100 North Western Avenue Chicago, gosh I'll never forget that address.... Allied's Knight kit Ocean Hopper regen receiver kit. I made my first ham radio contact from my very own ham shack with this and a home brew transmitter from ARRL's "How to be(come?) a Radio Amateur book(let)". I even wound a honey comb coil for it. All in the fall of 1958... Wish I still had both today.73,John, W9JGO

Hallicrafters S22R, given to me by W2BXW, my "Elmer", when I was 11 years old. This was the height of the cold war, with all of its propaganda and counter-propaganda. Listened very frequently to 75 meter AM. Listened to NSS and NAM to get my code speed up.

It was a Hallicrafters SX-43 that belonged to my dad, he was a deputy sheriff in the late 1940's and he would leave it on the sheriff dispatch freq somewhere around 32 MC and I would use it for SWLing and got in so much trouble so many times that by about the third grade, he gave me the receiver. Later on, I got a Hammarlund HQ-100AC and then a Hallicrafters SX-110, the one with the slide rule dial.

I started out SWLing back in the early 1960’s. My first receiver was an old floor-model furniture radio labeled “Midwest”. It covered AM, FM and three shortwave bands from 3.0 to 28.0 mcs. Never heard anything on FM, but AM and the SW’s worked pretty well. I think I heard just about all of the big SW broadcasters back then, and QSL’ed as many as possible. I actually heard my name announced on Radio Switzerland’s DX mailbag program – way cool! Then I started utility DXing, logging military, coastal, aeronautical, whatever. Other receivers between 1960 and 1974:

Heathkit GR-64 – yes, I built it, and got the local Heathkit store to align it. Worked ok.Hammarlund HQ-145 – nice!Hammarlund HQ-180 – owned 3 over time; would just about kill to have one back.

No activity between 1974 and 1979, but got back into the hobby with a Panasonic RF-2900, another one of my favorites. After it died, I picked up a Sangean ATS-803A, which I still use today, mostly listening on 150 – 530 khz for non-directional beacons (NDBs) and experimental 500 khz stations. Not a bad radio. Most of my radio time these days is spent on the ham bands, but one of these days, I’ll hook up a longwire to my FT-817 and see how it receives the longwave frequencies.

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